All this warms the cockles of my Dutch heart, of course, but it offers up the West as a caricature of sweetness and light, which is then contrasted not to specific places, like Somalia, Kenya or Saudi Arabia, but to the whole Muslim world. Because of this, Hirsi Ali tends to fly into a rage when the inhabitants of this Garden of Eden fail sufficiently to appreciate their good fortune
Well, relatively speaking, isn't the West better? Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a liberal, in the sense that the word "liberal" used to have not so long ago. She believes reason and human rights is fundamentally better than tribalism and religious fanaticism. Ergo, the West that has these things is better than the Muslim world that does not. With regard to women's rights, the issue she is passionate about, the sins of the West are trivial compared to those of the Muslim world.
Few people in the West would have had trouble agreeing with this position 100 years ago. Today, she must re-export it to a West that can only seem to concentrate on what is bad about itself.
My late father, who was a professor of literature, used to say that the self-confidence of the West had been shattered by the revelation of Nazi war crimes. I think he had a good point. That was the genesis, all this multi-culti self-loathing is but the aftermath. |
